junegunn
commented
2 years ago This should work.
fzf --preview='fzf -f {q} < /dev/tty'Or something like this
ls | fzf --preview='ls | fzf -f {q}'Explanation:
With --preview, you're starting an fzf process in a non-interactive environment where the standard input of it is not attached to a TTY device (i.e. keyboard input). When the standard input is a TTY device, fzf will use the default find command (or $FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND) to populate the list of candidates. This is to allow fzf without explicit input.
# STDIN is not a TTY device, so fzf just reads the output of `find .`
find . | fzf
# It can be tedious to always have to write `find . |` before fzf, so let's provide a shortcut.
# In this case, STDIN is a TTY device, which means fzf is probably not attached to an input process,
# so instead of reading STDIN, fzf starts a child process to populate the input list
export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND='find .'
fzf
digitalsignalperson
man fzf)Info
Problem / Steps to reproduce
Problem
I'm trying to achieve seeing a preview of the items currently matching the query all concatenated together:
fzf --preview='head (fzf -f "{q}")'or even better
--preview='head (fzf -f "{q}") | less -p{}'to jump to the section of the current line in the pagerBut using
fzf -f "{q}"doesn't work when called from the preview function.Steps to reproduce:
First create some files in an empty folder
The output of
fzf -f his as expected:The output of
head (fzf -f h)is as expected:And that is what I expected to see in the preview window after I type "h" as my query with the command
fzf --preview='head (fzf -f "{q}")'. But the preview window is empty.If I do
fzf --preview='fzf -f "{q}"', the preview is empty regardless of the query. If I dofzf --preview='echo "{q}" && fzf -f "{q}"'I can indeed see the query in the panel, so puzzled why no result from fzf.If I create a preview.sh to try and debug this, I can see it is working in the current directory, but the
fzf -foutput always returns 1 (no result) even if I hard code a query.Tried both bash and fish. Also tried wrapping the preview's fzf call in like
env -i bash -l -c 'fzf -f {q}'in case some funky environment thing is happening, but no luck.Further discussion
For the available substitutions for preview, there is no "list of currently filtered items". The closest thing is the list of selected items
{+}. Theoretically I can get the "list of currently filtered items" viafzf -f {q}or feeding the query to fzf in script mode.My use case would also probably also include
--multi --bind "enter:select-all+accept"since my goal is to output the list of files matching the query after I'm satisfied with the preview.While I could also do
--preview='head {+}', I'd have to select all first, maybe with some keybinding like ctrl+a, but it breaks the real-time flow of seeing the concatenated view change as I change the query. I also noticed if I did ctrl+a then modified the query the original items are still selected. I'd rather just use the current matches to the query, like if a{q}option existed.